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Studio Art Practice Meets Generative Art / Creative Coding

Self Portrait, 2018

Matt Kane is an artist working with code, data, robots and paint.

"I designed my custom software to leverage algorithms with my own human input. I build paintings layer by layer, making design choices through how the algorithms I've written should interact. I communicate in color and pattern in ways I long understood but which are too complex or time consuming for my hand and materials to manifest physically with traditional methods. I'm interested in exploring historical aesthetics with code; to do with geometry what the great painters did with oils."

"A great deal of digital art these days is created with the push of a single button. But I came into the digital space with the work ethic I cultivated in the years I built my own frames, stretched my own canvas, mixed my own paint, and could spend tens or hundreds of hours on a single painting. I wanted to discover what I could create by combining this tireless attitude with the exhaustive generative capabilities of code. An average painting of mine these days consists of over a million unique shapes, 100+ layers, and spend 12+ hours of my time while I make literally thousands of changes to hundreds of design variables across the user interface of my software."

"Matt's approach to art and technology is unique and refreshing" —SuperRare

A Chicago born, gallery exhibited artist in his early twenties, Kane left the art world for a decade to work as a web developer in the Pacific Northwest. It was there that he taught himself programming, gained life experience, and made career choices centered around creating, at a future date, the work he's currently devoted. Kane began as a painter of oils to become a painter of code.